The protection of personal information and/or other secured resources, such as, for example, credit data, medical history, financial account information, secured physical locations and the like is of ever increasing concern to businesses and individuals alike. To be sure, each passing day reveals more sophisticated attacks by those who would gain unauthorized access to such resources absent the constant vigilance of those charged with the protection of such resources. To this end, the various security protocols employed for the protection of such resources almost universally include some means for authenticating the identity of a person, entity, device or the like attempting to gain access to a secured resource.
More often than not the critical authentication is carried out by the age old process of providing a privately held password, personal identification number or the like in connection with some generally publicly-known identifier for the person, entity, device or the like attempting to gain access to the secured resource. Unfortunately, however, this protocol is dogged by vulnerability to interception through spoofing, eavesdropping, and countless other techniques through which a password, personal identification number or the like may become known to an attacker. Additionally, it is common to find that a single person, entity, device or the like uses the same password, personal identification number or the like in connection with gaining access to multiple secured resources. In such case, a security breach in connection with a single secured resource may jeopardize the security of all other secured resources.
Given the fundamentally flawed state of the art with respect to password-type protection, it is therefore the overriding object of the present invention to improve over the prior art by providing a system by which authentication may be more securely conducted. Additionally, it is an object of the present invention to provide such a system that is robust in specific implementation and readily usable by any manner of person, entity, device or the like. Finally, it is an object of the present invention to provide such a system that is economical in implementation and therefore readily accessible to virtually any application.